When this project came to me, I got excited because I grew up working on cars and there is a lot to love about these machines. Automobiles are a work of art themselves; a symphony of fuel, fire, steel and rubber. So, even if it's a simple project, I got excited to bring this machine to life.

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The task was to build facial expressions in blender to be animated with mocap. Using a blender add-on called FaceIt, this would be a much more straight forward task if this was a human character. I didn't let this dissuade me so I got to work.

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FaceIt enabled me to get to an advanced starting point, but I had to use my skills in weight painting, modeling, and sculpting to customize the expressions for this car specifically with inspiration from characters in moveis like Disney's Cars .

Making the eyes blink was also a custom addition to this rig. By modeling some covers inspired by cars I had been familiar with growing up. See below.

For the body rig, I made a simple set of controls and constraints to get the car to pivot in a way that a car suspension would. I also built in some deformation into the wheels giving the character one more way to emote.

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From there the Ethan from 'The Animist' took over and did some great animation! I'm proud of this project and it wil be seen all over North Carolina!